Tim Kaine, en Español

As Hillary Clinton’s Vice-Presidential candidate, the Virginia senator Tim Kaine may appeal to many Hispanic voters because of his immigration-reform advocacy and his fluent command of Spanish.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAHI CHIKEWENDIU / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY

On June 11, 2013, Tim Kaine requested permission to do something unprecedented on the Senate’s floor. “I ask unanimous consent that I be able to deliver a floor speech on immigration reform in Spanish,” Kaine said. With permission granted, he started to talk about the importance of the language he had learned while performing missionary work in Honduras as a twenty-two-year-old. “This is a language that has been spoken in this country ever since Spanish missionaries founded San Agustín, Florida (today’s Saint Augustine), in 1565,” he explained. “Close to forty million Americans speak the language today.” Kaine then congratulated the group of senators who had crafted S.744, the ultimately unsuccessful bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would later be dryly known as the Gang of Eight bill. During fourteen minutes of uninterrupted, effortless Spanish, Kaine laid out how immigration reform would work under the bill, including a nuanced description of border security, while making an argument for the benefits of both high- and low-skilled immigration into the United States. Kaine concluded on a conciliatory note: “We will show our country and the world that this piece of legislation is not Republican or Democratic but, rather, strongly bipartisan and American.”

Kaine’s historic speech on immigration illustrates two of the assets that have now made him Hillary Clinton’s choice for Vice-President. First, in an era of legislative rancor, Kaine is known as a centrist bridge builder. Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, a Republican (though one of Donald Trump’s most committed opponents within the Party), praised Kaine only a few minutes after the Clinton campaign’s official announcement. In addition, the 2013 speech dramatically highlighted one of Kaine’s most noticeable selling points: his fluent, colloquial Spanish, which is unprecedented at this level in contemporary American politics, Jimmy Carter’s best efforts aside.

I interviewed Senator Kaine a couple of weeks ago, on Univision’s Sunday-morning talk show, Al Punto. We spoke at length in Spanish about police shootings, national security, immigration, and Central America, a region Kaine knows well. I was surprised by his capacity to ad-lib freely on policy and politics in his second language. When I asked him whether it was realistic to expect immigration reform with Congress under Republican control, Kaine remained optimistic. “After November 8th, Republicans will listen to the voters,” he argued. “There are Republican senators who support the idea, like Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio, so I feel confident we’ll be able to do it.”

But most of all I was impressed by his wit in a language that is not his own. When I told him that not every American politician speaks Spanish so fluently, Kaine quickly downplayed it (“un poquito de Spanglish”), but then reminded viewers of the more than three hundred thousand potential Latino voters in his home state of Virginia, a November battleground. After the interview, when I again pointed out how well he spoke Spanish, Kaine responded with a phrase one might expect from a sharp-tongued comedian: “Bueno, no soy Cervantes”—or, in English, “Well, I'm not Cervantes.”

Kaine’s proficiency could help Hillary Clinton in November, though perhaps not significantly. According to a recent poll, only twenty-six per cent of Hispanic voters say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who spoke Spanish fluently. The number is thirty-six per cent among those born abroad, and thirty-nine per cent among those who have kept Spanish as their preferred language in the United States. The numbers might not be overwhelming, but they could make a difference in swing states where the Latino electorate plays an increasingly important role, like Colorado and Nevada, and perhaps even Georgia, North Carolina, or, indeed, Virginia, where Kaine received seventy per cent of the Hispanic vote in his 2012 Senate race against the Republican George Allen. The fact that Kaine is a practicing Catholic, like sixty-two per cent of Hispanics is the United States, probably won’t hurt, either.

But more than the statistics behind Senador Kaine’s possible effect on the election, one has to consider the narrative. Four years ago, the Republican Party pledged to rethink its relationship with the country’s Hispanic community. But then came Donald Trump. At the Party Convention, in Cleveland, last week, the most radical opponents of immigration reform in Congress were given the spotlight. The Party that had considered nominating Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush—both of whom speak elegant, eloquent Spanish, and once supported immigration reform—instead heavily promoted Senators Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was given a chance to speak about the border wall, just shy of prime time.

In that context, it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast than the one Tim Kaine might offer. On the campaign trail, Kaine will have the unprecedented opportunity to talk about the issues Hispanics care about, and do it, if need be, in their own language. He has already begun, with a well-received turn at the mic during his first event with Clinton, in Miami. After Kaine’s speech, Republican strategist Ana Navarro tweeted that Kaine would be “a hell of a good surrogate” for Clinton with Hispanics. “He gets it,” Navarro added. It’s safe to assume that Kaine will be frequently interviewed by Hispanic outlets, both in America and abroad, in the following months, with no possible Republican retort. (Mike Pence does not speak Spanish, and there are no other Spanish-literate Trump surrogates in sight; Bush and Cruz aren’t going to help, and Rubio is keeping his distance.) In Philadelphia, Kaine might even jump at the chance to make history again, and, without the need to ask for permission, take the floor of the Democratic National Convention and deliver part of his discurso en español.